page_title: History of trade and industry in Birmingham
section_title: 17th century
hierarchical_section_title: History of trade and industry in Birmingham / 17th century
caption_attribution_description: English: A snaphance lock, cocked, showing the outside of the mechanism
context_page_description: Birmingham was a flourishing medieval market town.
context_section_description: 1642: The early Birmingham mathematician and astronomer Nathaniel Nye publishes A New Almanacke and Prognostication calculated exactly for the faire and populous Towne of Birmicham in Warwickshire, where the Pole is elevated above the Horizon 52 degrees and 38 minutes, and may serve for any part of this Kingdome.
  Birmingham's principal tradesmen during the English Civil War were the smiths, who were called upon to manufacture over 15,000 sword blades, these are supplied to Parliamentarian forces only. One of the town's leading minds, 'Nathaniel Nye' is recorded as testing a Birmingham cannon in 1643. Nye also experimented with a saker in Deritend in 1645. From 1645 he became the master gunner to the Parliamentarian garrison at Evesham and in 1646 he successfully directs the artillery at the Siege of Worcester, detailing his experiences and in his 1647 book The Art of Gunnery, believing that war is as much a science as an art.
  The earliest known clockmakers in the town arrived from London in 1667. Between 1770 and 1870 there were over 700 clock and watch makers in Birmingham.
  In 1689 Sir Richard Newdigate, one of the new, local Newdigate Baronets, approaches manufacturers in the town with the notion of supplying the British Government with small arms. It is stressed that they would need to be of high enough calibre to equal the small arms that were being imported from abroad. After a successful trial order in 1692, the Government places its first contract. On 5 January 1693, the "Officers of Ordnance" chooses five local firearms manufacturers to initially produce 200 "snaphance musquets" per month over the period of one year, paying 17 shillings per musket, plus 3 shillings per hundredweight for delivery to London.
caption: External view of a cocked 17th century snaphance lock on musket, a weapon Birmingham was selling to London.
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